In the fading light, I thought this little snow peeping rock and weedlets was charmingly fresh and sweet.

We said our goodbyes to the White Mountains after a lengthy and frustrating argument over whether there was enough daylight left to get out of the snows, by trapped, or just go full steam ahead down yet another snowly hillside where there was supposed to be a "track". Three against one prevailed and we made it out of the mountains in time to stop for gas and start back to our base camp.

Well, it seems a lot of the blue agate was still under the snow. We tried a few road cuts and found a really great piece out in front of a local General Store in the tiny town of Luna. It was too big to carry away without being noticed, and it was not for sale. ;-)

This is the good road. That is the jeep that rolled later on in the night. Total loss, no one seriously hurt. After two hours on bad snow filled and lonely roads it was conference time.. Where is the agate? The light faded as we pondered our next move.

We had to four-wheel-it down thirteen miles of barely visible roads that were getting icier by the minute and that was just to get to the regularily maintained roads. The strong feeling that it was just too early to be going for agate that was still covered with snow began to sink into the more intent member of the group.

Luna Blue in New Mexicooooo

We had done all the "dry" and comfortable stuff. All of us had sat amongst the cow pies with our little agate collecting buckets and forked sticks, poking around in the dust for treasure. We had slithered under the "bobwire" fences and gotten a seat full of stickers. All of us were tired from trudging up the mountainsides for the rainbow agate (major joke played on readers of an unmentionable set of "Rockhounding in Arizona" booklets) some whiley writer had used to sell a book.

We had gazed at the form of Locomotive Peak trying to figure out what they were thinking when naming it. We needed something to get that a seeker had to really go a long ways for and something a little more exotic. We picked Luna Agate as a target material.

Out came the maps and we took time to study them while we ground away at our little troves of Amydules, those little drips of white agate that sometimes show up imbedded in basalt. We wanted something with a little color in it. Luna Blue sped to the top of the desirables list.

Luna Blue is incredible stuff. It's really blue, and blue is one of the most rare colors of agate. We had to try for this, and it was only about 300 miles away. Imagine the fire in our brains!

Here's a link to what it looks like, and believe me, you want it when you see it. And this field trip was held in June, a full four months after the one we ventured out to the snows in.

.California Federation of Mineral Societies

I came back and patched this broken link. Now the Luna Blue trip is in the archives at the CFMS site. All you need to do is click on the "Field Trips" Button just under the wording for CFMS, at the top of the Header. Then look for the "Archive of Field Trip Photos 2000 to 2005". And there you will find the Luna Blue trip. The pictures aren't as clear, but it shows pretty well what that material looks like.

The mud and the slush awaits us...

Leaving again soon for another eating party. hehe

Yesterday was a busy day

First Ceramics club and chatting with all my friends there, and then we took the doggie to his groomer.

DH and I snagged a lunchtime salad at the food court at the Mall, and bathroom accessories for a redo of our little green bathroom. What fun, shopping for new stuff!

Then it was off to buy some shorter circ needles at a local shop ( Two Sisters Ana Ewe ) and snagged some DK superwash for socks at a 30% discount. Yeay! I need the shorter circs for the mystery shell. I've been courageously trying to read the confusing little bits and pieces of how to make it. It's getting clearer.

Today was a drive behind DH to drop off a vehicle, bring him back, a rush to a mammo gram, go shopping at home depot for more new stuff, stop off and renew my business registration, and home to type this out with a promise to do the the Luna pix again, and then get ready to go eat with rockhound friends. I'm taking my pino grigio slaw. I call it "mine" because I don't use pino grigio vinegar. Far to expensive!

Oh yes. And I actually got to wander around Trader Joe's with DH. They have five hundred kinds of cheese in there I bet. I don't get out enough. You can tell this, I bet.

South from Tucson

We had decided that we'd seen enough of the show at Tucson and bought enough rough for a good long while, so DH and I took off for the Four Metals Mine near Nogales. In the books it said that there was good collecting of Rhodocrosite and pyrites at this mine. We do know that a person shouldn't believe everything they read and now it's sort of our motto. What we did find was an abandoned mine shaft and roads that where most likely used by "coyotes" to ferry their charges across the back country and into the cruel deserts to the east of Tucson.

I don't expect that many of you would go down into an old gold mine but if the opportunity presents itself, don't ever do it, please. Several years ago, when I was a very young rockhound, I had just returned from a day of exploring gold mines and having the time of my life. My rockhound friends were agast. They told me hair raising tales of how silly idiots, like myself, had fallen hundreds of feet down vertical shafts that had been covered over by the dust and grit, while the planking that the miner's used to cover them slowly rotted away and left a death trap for the unwary. I always look longingly at them but never, ever, go in them anymore.

The places that we go to in the desert are so quiet. There's nothing like it, even the ocean is not this quiet. There's something mystical about this silent peace.

This is the road in. The mountain where the mine entrance is can't be seen from here. I think the border with Mexico, at Nogales, is not very far to the right, either. The Border Patrol has it's hands full around here.

The road back out. Jeeplie got a nice work out this day. this and the previous picture are two parts of a panoramic snap.

View out to the west from the top of the tailings.. This time we really got out there...

This yellowish mass is the tailing pile from the mine and in it we found pyrites and a few little pieces of rhodocrosite, a very pretty pink and black material. The mine entrance itself was just across the road from this tip. I could hear a radio playing mexican music very, very softly. That made me try to hurry DH up with his digging. Then came the coffee smells. The hair on the back of my neck started to stand up a bit then. I knew we should leave, and we did, indeed, meet the border patrol on the way out. They were in a very big hurry.

That mountain top is where we were headed. This is the Four Metals Mine in very Southerly Arizona. There was a smashed pickup a ways up the road and it had been there sometime. The road got really bad right there on the left and we didn't go up any farther. We were all alone out here, except, we found out later, for the prey. The border patrol was hunting these hills on the day we were there. Remember the mine? There were illegals inside of it, and I could smell their coffee. I had a very bad feeling about all this, so we left soon after that.

And this is a good road. See the narrow part down at the bottom? This is a grade of about 40 degrees. It was fun. Really...

When you see one of these, don't go in there....